After insisting no one was receiving unsolicited e-mails from the White House, officials reversed their story Monday night and blamed outside political groups for the unwanted messages from the tech-savvy operation.

White House online director Macon Phillips said in a blog posting that independent groups—he didn’t name them—had signed-up their members to receive regular updates about Obama’s projects, priorities and speeches.

The White House had consistently denied that anyone who hadn’t sought the e-mails had received them.

But we can believe them when they now tell us that it’s not their fault. Because nothing, of course, is ever this administration’s fault.

You can see (via Jake Tapper) the administration’s official response itself here, which by the way says that if you objected to this you’re probably a fear-mongerer defending the status quo. No, really:

An ironic development is that the launch of an online program meant to provide facts about health insurance reform has itself become the target of fear-mongering and online rumors that are the tactics of choice for the defenders of the status quo.

Charming post by Macon Phillips, that was; and not nearly as good at hiding his petulance at having to explain things to the common mob as he thinks he is. Well, that’s DC for you – anyway, they’ve also rewritten the sign-up process to stop people from forwarding their spam folders en masse as an act of protest against this proto-Stasi operation fix the problem. It looks like it’d work well enough, for its ostensible purpose: imagine if they had had the mother-wit to do this fifteen minutes of work in the first place. Imagine if the administration in general had the corporate inclination to demand more than a slapdash job. On anything…